This image shows how beautifully Photomatix Pro can capture the highlight details while also attending to the details in the shadow areas. This image was made from three exposures two stops apart.

This image is an example of HDR making the impossible become easy. The set of three exposures -2EV, 0EV, +2EV, brought out all of the interior details and shadows, and yet still captured the sky detail.

The photos that made up this HDR image of Hickory Falls were taken on a very cold October morning. I was using a Canon 300mm L with my Canon 5D Mark II. I only took three exposures, two stops apart — 0EV, -2EV, and +2EV. The histogram in the camera showed that my underexposed image captured all of the highlights, and that my over-exposed image captured all of the shadow details. Thus, only three exposures.

Before I loaded the images into Photomatix Pro 4, I made some synchronized adjustments in Lightroom 3. I find it most helpful to my images if I sharpen for source with the raw images, as well as performing some noise reduction. Here are the setting that I find work the best.

I created the HDR image using Photomatix Pro 4 Fusion with Tone Compressor and Detail Enhancer. I didn’t plan it that way, but I liked most of the image using the Fusion operator, but I didn’t like the fact that some of the trees were too dark and the sky looked a little drab. Take a look:

When I viewed how the tone mapping looked using the Detail Enhancer, I noticed that some of the dark trees near the top of the image had better illumination. But that is all that I liked about it, but I made a note to blend them in using Photoshop CS5, with the help of a layer mask. Here it is:

Then I checked out how things looked using the Tone Compressor option. It gave me the best looking sky of the three. So I saved a version of that and blended it in with Photoshop as well.

Here is the Photoshop layers with the layer masks so you can see the areas I blended in:

Sometimes in Photomatix Pro 4, tone mapping an image is really benefitted by also using the Fusion operator. Here is an image from a high contrast scene that required me to shoot six exposures: -2EV, 0EV, 2EV, -1EV, -3EV, and 1EV. (I knew I needed more than my initial set of three by checking the histogram in my camera, which showed my -2EV shot to still be clipping white.) When bracketing this many images, Lightroom 3 really streamlines the process of making sharpening and noise reduction adjustments to the raw images and then exporting them to Photomatix Pro 4 via the Photomatix plugin. Here are my settings in Lightroom 3:

If your workflow has you sharpening and reducing noise in Adobe Camera Raw, you will not see the adjustments reflected in Photomatix unless you save each raw file to a tiff file before loading them into Photomatix. To prove it to yourself, convert the raw files to B&W in Adobe Camera Raw, and then load them directly into Photomatix. You will output a color image. But using the adjustments in Lightroom 3 and loading the raw images via the Photomatix plugin, you will get the B&W image you were expecting, along with all of the other adjustments.

When the images were processed in Photomatix Pro 4, I was getting closer to the results I wanted using the Fusion operator. Not perfect, but close. The sky, as expected, was smooth with perfect illumination and the foliage looked great, too. But the rock cliff was too dark and contrasty.

When using the Detail Enhancer under Tone Mapping, I was able to get the rock cliff and the foreground rocks like I wanted, and I knew that it would easily blend in with the Fusion output using a layer mask in Photoshop.

I opened both of these files in Photoshop, and using the Duplicate Layer command, I placed the Detail Enhancer image on top of the Fusion image. I then added a layer mask, inverted it, and painted with white over the foreground and rock cliff section of the image.

If you are looking for a smooth and luminous sky, with great cloud details, then you might want to try the Exposure Fusion function in Photomatix Pro 4. It can save the day, as it did for me on this image.

Exposure Fusion is not a tone mapping operator, like the Detail Enhancer or even Tone Compressor. It is a simple blending process. It doesn’t proved the exposure latitude that tone mapping provides, but what it does, it does well. There are no halos, no painterly look. In short, it gives a very natural look. It is great for photographs that feature the sky, or water, or even interior walls on architectural shots.

Tone mapping on smooth areas of a scene can cause strong fluctuations in the luminosity and it can bring out details where you prefer the natural smoothness. The following image is from five images, each exposed one stop apart, -2, -1, 0EV, +1, and +2. I was happy with the lighting on the grasses and trees, but the sky looked awful:

So I kept what I liked and got rid of the rest. I blended into the image the sky (and part of the water) that was created with the Exposure Fusion process in Photomatix Pro 4. What a difference!

High Definition Photography is a relative term, but it basically is achieved by using great camera gear and also by breaking a large scene into several sections, and photographing each section separately. This makes it possible for the photographer to get more detailed information on the camera sensor. You can also focus in on each section to get incredible sharpness and depth-of-field. But it also involves a lot of post-processing work. But it is worth it when you print your images at sizes like 40 x 60 and they look fantastic, surpassing the results of photographers using an 8 x 10 view camera.

And this is no exaggeration. Twice I have had professional photographers come up to me at a show and tell me my images had better detail than what they were able to achieve with an 8 x 10.

The first rule to follow when shooting HDR images that you plan to stitch together, is to put your camera on manual exposure. If you were to shoot in aperture priority (which is ideal when shooting only one scene) then every part of your composition would have different exposures, depending on the brightness or darkness of that section of your final image. The HDR process will give you the exposure latitude you need, but you don’t want your highlights coming out as middle gray.

The second rule to follow is to use a tripod.

The third rule to follow is to make sure that you process every image with the exact same HDR tone mapping settings. On this image, I did that, but on the sections that had the rushing waterfall in them, I did two settings.

Let me explain. When I processed the sections that had the waterfall in them, everything looked great — except the water. The tone mapping process brought in too much hardness and contrast, not to mention artifacting (which happens frequently if there is a lot of motion). After some experimenting with the highlight smoothness, shadow smoothness and micro smoothness sliders, I was able to come up with a tone mapping recipe which rendered the waterfalls in a much more natural way. So in Photoshop, with a layer mask, I was able to brush in the desired effect of the water while keeping the non-smoothed effect of the rocks. Here are the two versions, beginning with the undesirable look of the water, followed by the version which is smoother:

Here is how simple that was accomplished in Photoshop:

If you are not sure how to load two photos as separate layers in Photoshop, here is an easy way. Select the images you need in Bridge (or Lightroom), and then go to Tools — Photoshop — Load files into Photoshop Layers. Here is what the menu looks like:

One other important point about using two different tone mapping settings. You need to save the settings so you can go back to them quickly and easily. In Phtomatix, after you process the image, you go to File — Save Settings. Give your setting a name and Photomatix will save them with an .xmp extension.

When you need to go back to one of the settings that you have saved, you simply go the the Presets drop-down menu at the bottom of the tone mapping controls (just above the Process button). One of the options you will see as you scroll down the various presets, is an option for Load Settings.

When you are shooting the several sections that will make up your final image, you want to overlap the images so that Photoshop, or whatever stitching program you are using, has the information needed to align all of the images. I usually overlap the images by about a 1/4 or 1/5 of the image on all sides.

Also, there are several software programs that you can use to stitch together your HDR images (or non-HDR images for that matter). I’ve gotten good results from Photoshop CS3, CS4, and CS5. But don’t try it if you are using CS2. Kids in kindergarten can photomerge better than Photoshop CS2.

Other programs you might try are Hugin, APP, PTGui, Realviz, and Stitcher.

When you are stitching HDR photos together, a logical thing to consider is the order of the workflow. Do you stitch each exposure set into a panorama (all of the 0EVs into one, the -2 EVs into another, the +2 EVs into another)? If so then you would merge all of these panoramas into a single 32-bit HDR file, and then tone map. This is a possible workflow, but it can be plagued with alignment issues.

Another possibility is to merge each section of exposures into a 32-bit HDR file, and then stitch them together before you tone map. You can stitch 32-bit HDR files together in Photoshop CS5. After Photoshop stitches these files together, merge the layers, and save it as a 32-bit HDR file for tone-mapping in Photmatix Pro. Or if you want to tone map it in Photoshop, go to Image, Mode and change the selection from 32 Bits/Channel to 16 Bits/Channel. You can also choose the 8 Bits/Channel, but you will be more effective in manipulation of colors and luminance values in the 16 Bits mode. When you are all done with your adjustments, change it to the 8 Bits mode.

If you change the mode to 16 Bits or 8 Bits, you will be presented with the following Photoshop HDR Toning menu:

I, personally, prefer to do my tone mapping in Photomatix Pro 4, because it offers more control, such as color temperature, and shadow and highlight smoothness, and White Point, and Black Point. And if you too prefer Photomatix, then save the stitched file as a 32 Bits/Channel HDR image and open it in Photomatix.

Also, it should be noted that all of the stitching programs I mentioned earlier can also read and stitch 32-bit HDR files. My experience in proceeding in this workflow is that the 32-bit stitched file created is too big and it can sometimes crash the computer.

What I find that works best is to merge the files of the different EV values, then tone map them all with the same settings, save them as 8 Bit (or 16 bit) files, and then stitch them together. But before doing all that work, I usually do a test stitch of all of the 0EV files. More than once, I have tone mapped nine different files, only to discover later that the images (for some reason or another) couldn’t be aligned.

Anyway, this final image was comprised of six triple exposures. By the way, I merged, tone mapped, and then stitched.

Here is the final version:

Sometimes, when you create what you thought would be a great HDR landscape, the sky, with its clouds, appears very contrasty, dirty, and ugly. The tone mapping process using a local operator such as the Detail Enhancer in Photomatix Pro, can sometime exaggerate the realism that is needed.

Global operators use advanced algorithms that look at a pixel and compare it an area of surrounding pixels. Pixels surrounded by brightness are compressed differently than those surrounded by darkness. This can cause halos, especially where the bright sky meets a much darker part of the landscape. It can also cause clouds to sometimes look unnatural.

Global operators, like Photomatix’s Tone Compressor or FDR Tools’s Simplex and Receptoruse simple algorithms that apply the same compression to the entire image. This creates a smoother, and usually less impactful image. But sometimes this smoothness is required, at least in part of the image.

In this image, the original HDR sky, made from the Detail Enhancer operator in Photomatix, didn’t look bad. But the version made with the Tone Compressor looked better. It had better color, and was smoother. The clouds looked softer, and more pastel. Here are the two versions, first the Detail Enhancer version, followed by the Tone Compressor version:

Although the sky looks beautiful, the rest of the Tone Compressor version looked very underexposed. The foreground is in total blackness, and since I was shooting an autumn scene in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I didn’t want to go that route for that part of the image.

The first inclination I had was to make a mask and insert the sky version I wanted on top of the foreground version I wanted. But the values were so different that it looked terrible. Just so you believe me, take a look:

So what to do when faced with a situation like this is to load one image in Photoshop as a layer on top of the other image. Then add a layer mask, and create a black to white (or white to black) gradient, depending on what you are trying to gradually reveal or gradually conceal. Here is how I did it:

That left me with only needing to make a Levels adjustment in the Lab Color mode to fine tune the contrast and hue/saturation.

Here is the final version:

Let me know if you like how it came out.

When shooting interiors, and relying on HDR to solve the lighting challenge, not only do you need to balance the luminance values of the outside light and the interior light, but you also need to balance the light temperatures from the two or more light sources. There are many approaches to this, and here is one I recently used.

When shooting this interior shot, I knew that I would have to balance the cooler outside light with the warm interior lights, so I took multiple exposures with my camera’s light balance settings adjusted for both. I thought I would easily just blend in the two versions and be finished. But it didn’t quite work out that way.

Quite often, when using HDR to shoot interiors, the tone mapping process (when using a local operator like the Detail Enhancer in Photomatix) will leave sections of white walls looking dark and dirty. And that is what happened here. So I needed to also tone map a version of the image using the Tone Compressor operator, which gives walls a much cleaner and smoother look. (Sometimes you can benefit using this operator with clouds in landscape photography.)

But I only wanted to use this smooth version for the back wall. For the windows, which were way too blue, I needed another version:

And lastly, for the bar and furniture, I wanted to use a very aggressive version of the Detail Enhancer.

After opening all three HDR files, I decided to use the version with the Tone Compressor operator as the base layer. I then loaded the image with the correct outside light balance as the second layer. With a simple layer mask and some Overlay Blend Mode painting, I was easily able to blend the two images together.

I then created a third layer from the over-the-top Detail Enhancer tone mapped version, which I scaled back with the opacity slider after brushing it in the areas I wanted, which again, was mostly the furniture.

Here is the finished version.

HDR is great for photographing flowers, especially doing macro photography. The HDR effect on flowers in the details can be exquisite. And it gives great latitude for your creative expression.

This image was made from three exposures, two stops apart. I tone mapped them in Photomatix Pro 4. Here are the three images I started with:

I tone mapped the merged file with these settings (very subjective) after much experimentation:

Here is what the initial version looked like:

I tweaked the image some more in Photoshop to increase the contrast. I also decreased the color saturation in the white petals (there was too much of a blue cast) and increased the saturation in the center of the flower. And finally, I adjusted the hue to give some warmth to the image.

The image came a long way from the initial three exposures.

Ghosting happens in HDR images when something moves. For example, leaves in a tree blow in the wind and are captured in different positions in the different exposures. When those exposures are merged and tonemapped, the ghosting appears.

Ideally, when photographing trees, I want to do so when the wind is still. But that is not always possible, especially when I am out of town. But there are solutions to this problem.

Here are the three images I used on what was a low contrast day. I spaced the exposures one stop apart, auto-bracketed.

There was a soft breeze blowing, so I knew I would have some issues to overcome, as the Spanish moss was swaying back and forth. And as you will see below, I also had some leaves movings, which caused ghosting.

Here is a closeup detail of a section that shows the ghosting:

There are two ways to go about resolving this issue. The first one I want to discuss is using Photomatix Pro 4′s semi-manual Reduce Ghosting Artifacts command. Shortly after you drop your files into Photomatix Pro 4, you will see this menu:

Select that option and hit the Preprocess button on the bottom. You will next be greeted by this menu:

This window gives you the opportunity to select multiple areas of your image that contain ghosting. It’s easy to do, too. The first step, as the directions indicate, is to drag with your cursor, a border around the area you want to select. You can adjust the brightness and size of the image with the sliders on the bottom so that you can see your outline more easily. Here is my initial selection:

Then you must do the second step of Control-clicking or right-clicking inside the area to mark it as ghosted. This is required before you select another area in your image:

Your dotted white line now becomes a solid white line and you can now preview the deghosting:

So here is the result of the deghosting, which you can compare with the image detail I showed you previously which had no deghosting:

There is some improvement, but not enough. So this leaves us with the second approach, which is a full-manual approach. This involves using one of the separate exposures as a layer in Photoshop. In this case, the under-exposed image was my choice because it was just one stop under-exposed. I want this exposure because it uses a quicker shutter speed, with the result that the leaves and Spanish moss are less blurred.

Before I loaded this under-exposed image as a layer, I made some adjustments in Photoshop so that the luminance levels of the leaves were approximately the same as the HDR image. After I loaded the image as a layer, I created a layer mask and inverted it to black. I then selected the layer mask, and painted with white on those parts of the image where I wanted the leaves to show from the under-exposed image (with the adjusted luminance levels). Here is what my layer mask looked like when I was done:

When you compare the detail of this version to the semi-manual approach from Photomatix, you will see that this version is more detailed. Take a look:

Here is the final result: